Often patients have difficulty swallowing medications in tablet or pill form; however for many medications, this is the only form in which it is available. Also, many pills come with coatings or are otherwise designed to break down after ingestion, but in cases where patients are very young, elderly, and/or ill this breakdown of medication is disrupted and either occurs much slower than desired or not at all. In order to more easily and effectively administer medications in such cases, pills are often comminuted with a mortar and pestle or other mechanical device that generally crushes and/or grinds the pill between two hard surfaces. Once the pills are comminuted the powder is generally transferred to a container where it is mixed with fluid or food for administering to a patient.
In order to reduce cross-contamination and material loss, pairs of inexpensive, single use, nesting containers are used to comminute one or more pills between the bottoms of the nesting containers. These containers can then be separated and the comminuted medication can then be scraped and mixed or suspended in a fluid or food for administering to a patient.
When a machine is used to comminute the medication, it is often easy for the operator of the machine to forget to place the upper cup in place over the lower cup containing the medication. As a result, when the medication is crushed it creates a mess that is difficult to clean up, and to clean up safely. Furthermore, the machine can create toxic airborne dust, there can be a loss of dosage of the medication, and there can be cross-contamination between the medications given to different patients if the crushing chamber of the machine is not thoroughly cleaned. On top of this, it causes down-time and delays in a care-giver's schedule. The outcome of not placing a second cup on top of the pills in the first cup is therefore costly and hazardous.
This background information is provided to reveal information believed by the applicant to be of possible relevance to the present invention. No admission is necessarily intended, nor should be construed, that any of the preceding information constitutes prior art against the present invention.